To me, it would depend on the context, but it’s widely considered racist and derogatory in the West. I don’t see the equivalence between it and “adoga”. Taiwanese people are influenced by the Western beauty standards, and generally consider a high-bridged nose desirable. People in my circle and myself don’t use that term, but I have a hard time imagining it being used in a malice way, other than it indicates “otherness”.
BTW, in this post, you used the term “Romany Gypsies”. Are you aware that using the term Gypsy to refer to Roma people is offensive to them?
First I want to say that there have been many people that have been very nice to me here.
The effect generally is like a one two Punch.
First people assume that s foreigners Chinese isn’t good and maybe their English is not good. Maybe the foreigner is not a good person so it’s easier to avoid.
Second is when people feel free to talk cause they assume people can’t speak English. This multiplies the “othering” effect. If someone looks asian , Chinese or taiwanese they might not feel what this feels like. Language like the terms stated reinforce this.
Third is like a kick in the nuts when the very few people act badly. You have already felt the other two things on a large scale.
We do not know the origins of the Eastern Foreign Barbarians. They reside on the islands of the outer sea beyond Penghu. They live all across the land, starting from Wankan (present day Budai, Jiayi), Callewangh (present day northern Anping, Tainan), passing through Tayowan (present day Anping, Tainan) , Jockan (present day Ka-tiānn, Takao), Tankoya Island (present day Takao), Siotamsui (present day Dongkang), Siang-khe-kháu (present day Xikou, Jiayi), Kaliling (present day Jiali, Tainan), Taparri (present day Tamsui, Taipei), and Tapangkan (present day Dapenkeng, Bali, New Taipei), their villages scatter for over a thousand miles. They are of diverse tribes, each forming their own community, consisting of sometimes a thousand people, sometimes five or six hundred. There are no chieftains; those with many offspring become the leaders, and others obey their commands. They admire bravery and love fighting. They also engage in running exercises day and night. Their feet are covered with layers callus from all the training, which allows them to walk on thorns and thistles as if on level ground, outrun horses, and run for an entire day without rest, covering several hundred miles. When conflict arise between neighboring communities, they raise armies and schedule battles. They engage in swift and fierce combat, causing injuries and casualties. Yet, the following day, they settle their grievances and return to normal, as if nothing had happened, without harboring any grudges. They consider the heads of the slain as trophies, removing the flesh but leaving the bones intact, hanging them at the gates. Those gates adorned with many hanging skulls are regarded as a mark of valor.
That’s the first paragraph. Chen Di, the author of 東番記 was fairly accurate about things he saw on the expedition. However, when he went into history of the island at the end, he started quoting false claims without doing any verification.
Had a Taiwanese friend who used to call me “shan ju” because he couldn’t run steep hills. I’ve always taken any of these nicknames or euphemisms as terms of endearment, probably stemming from jealousy.
It sounds interesting. I wonder: How different from current-day Mandarin is the Mandarin of that account? (Bearing in mind that I don’t even know current-day Mandarin.)
Like most things written back in the Ming and Qing dynasties, it was written in the literary language Hanbun (漢文), which even back then was probably already very different from spoken languages everywhere in China. That’s why studying how to write was barely easier for Chinese people at the time compared to any Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, or other aspiring writers in the Hanji sphere.
So compared to Mandarin today I’d say they are just two completely different languages. Without studying it, a native Mandarin speaker would probably get a lot of Hanbun wrong, since there are a lot of false friends between the two languages.
The text I found online is already punctuated. If you read the text as written, it wouldn’t be punctuated, and since the grammar is very different, even very well studied Mandarin speakers would sometimes misjudge where a word or a sentence starts or ends. It’s a fairly common phenomenon when it comes to digitizing Classical Hanbun Buddhist texts. People would just pick the wrong place to start or end a sentence, leaving us with completely wrong interpretation of the texts. It is made worse when a lot of the text is phonetic translations from another language, such as location names in 東番記, and especially every other word in Buddhist texts.
Yikes! Learning that language seems quite a challenge. At my age, I don’t think I’ll live long enough to read those texts.
But some years ago, @Dr_Milker advised me to take “baby steps” in learning Mandarin. Maybe it’s time to start those baby steps, and just see how far I can get.
I agree, but judging from my (admittedly limited) reading of snippets of analogous kinds of accounts in English, it might be a sort of fun.
Edited to add: When I was a kid, my dad told me a story about a mathematician, who specialized in the more abstruse kinds of math, and who was disappointed when someone found a use for his work.
I know a couple of scholars, especially religious scholars who learned how to read Hanbun, but never learned how to read Mandarin and never bothered learning how to speak the language.
